This invention relates to a motion picture recording/reproducing apparatus for recording and reproducing motion picture data.
In these years, realization of multichannel broadcasting or broadband network for motion picture data based on digital television broadcast has enabled users to acquire or view many sorts of motion picture data. In addition, a motion picture compressing/decompressing technique has been improved, hardware/software for realizing the technique have been increasingly cheaper, and storage media have been increased in capacity and decreased in cost. As a result, users can easily store many sorts of motion picture data, and the quantity of motion picture data recordable and viewable is increasing. However, a busy user has no time to view all of such motion picture data, and consequently keeps an overflowing quantity of motion picture data not viewed yet in actual situations. For such a reason, it becomes important that, by viewing only vital scenes in many sorts of motion picture data, such a busy user can understand the contents of the sorts of motion picture data in a short time or can search for one of such many sorts of motion picture data which the user can really want to view.
In view of such circumstances, a technique for displaying an important scene in motion picture data is introduced, for example, in JP-A-2003-153139 or in “D. DeMenthon, V. Kobla, and D. Doermann, Video Summarization by Curve Simplification ACM Multimedia 98, Bristol, England, pp. 211-218, 1998 (Non-patent Literature 1)”.
Introduced in the above “Video Summarization by Curve Simplification”, in particular, is a technique for generating a feature from motion picture data, carrying out extraction and ranking of an important scene on the basis of the feature, and reproducing only the important scene at a rate specified by the user. By such a technique, it becomes possible for the user to grasp the contents of motion picture data in a short time.